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January 21, 2015

i've taken to skipping states of the union - which i know is not unusual overall, but which might be an unusual for a news junkie. it's the pageantry of state that annoys me: the state is everyone's little religion - just chock full of superstitious mumbo-jumbo and immune to rationality - and i am an atheist. but say you think the non-stop assertion of conservatives that the msm is leftist is ridiculous. how about nytimes headlines this morning: 'obama defiantly pushes his agenda', 'a bold call to action'. in the washpost: 'obama offers a helping hand to families', 'the remarkable confidence of barack obama', 'obama barrels into final act of presidency unbowed', etc. these are not opinion pieces, but news and analysis.

were we to survive the state for awhile, which seems unlikely, this period will be remembered as the dark ages: dominated utterly by an institutionalized irrational indefensible ideology seemingly accepted by everyone. everyone shares the same quasi-sane assumptions, which articulate our forms of universal oppression. i doubt we'll ever emerge, but so did all those poor secret atheists in 1120, so you never know. but, like us looking back on the medievals, future historians - if any - will find it hard to believe people actually believed this sort of stuff; they'll have difficulty reconstructing it as a possible human belief system, or penetrating its clotted or contentless rhetoric and the arbitrary or bizarre conclusions that people of this period used it to reach. they will know, as we know about the year 1120, that everyone just wanted a hierarchy of the most extreme variety, and would believe anything - anything - that would keep it in place. some wanted to subordinate others, some wanted to be subordinated by others - but nobody even sort of wanted people to be free or to think.

that everyone thought that some form of the semi-comprehensible theology just had to be right and that there were no decent or rational possibilities outside it does not mean that the stuff was sensible, or that any given person at any given moment couldn't have realized that and hopped off, at least in their heads. that everyone thought, or said, that it was self-evident that they should subordinate their bodies and minds to the catholic church did not make it self-evident. to what i think of as the right sort of person, those things just made it obvious, all day every day in your face, that the crap made no sense at all.

like medieval peasants, we're supposed to be bewildered by the costumes, the insignia, the architecture, the dead language, into thinking that these people are better and smarter than us, and that everyone should do what they say. (in this case, it should be obvious to the most superficial reflection that the people who attend the state of the union are no better and no smarter than the average peasant or felon. have you watched these people work? really, it was the same with the medieval papacy: corrupt, venal, in it for the sex and booze. but, like north korean generals, they had huge funky hats. i propose that we can assess the intelligence of these people by noting that on each side they just say all the same sentences over and over. they haven't had an idea in a half century. their intelligence, such as it is, is mechanical and their only ethic is manipulation.) in that stuff - the frippery, we might say - lurks the state's only actual legitmacy. it's what they have in place of any sort of moral justification for the sheer coercion on which their power in fact rests.

francis bacon: "if men went all mad after the same fashion, they might agree with one another well enough."

December 12, 2014

Speaking of which, here is the offical Crusader AXE position on CIA torture and such abominations. While I think it's a pretty good piece as these things go, as often happens with VetsToday, the comments are the best part. When a column gets that response, I feel like Sheldon Cooper, doomed to spend my life teaching evolution to fundamentalists in east Texas. On the other hand, they're pretty funny, if you don't mind feeling amazed at the stupidity of a hunk of the American population. Here's a personal favorite --

Since the massive Rhine meadows slaughter of 1.8 million Germans after WWII by your Rat Bastard leader Eisenhower torture has been a part of the US military efforts ever since! You rat bastard Yanks are far worse than the NAZIS ever were they were using these techniques for maybe ten to twelve years You Yankee Rat Bastards have been at it for 200 plus years and you Rat Bastards are proud of it! How long will you Rat Bastards remain in the sewers and latrine pits of humanity?

December 06, 2014

i think that abuse is inherent in a situation of police power, and that you're not going to get away with thinking the problem is 'a few bad apples' while of course the vast majority of police officers are doing a bang-up job, as it were. i actually don't think 're-training' and so on is going to address the basic issue at all.

so you are arming one part of the population against the rest, or authorizing some to use violence and coercion that, for the others, would be criminal. the first thing to ask is what sort of person, overall, is likely to want to perform this role, and why. i am sure there are various motivations. one is surely an attraction not to the law or to the public but to the power, which is of the most concrete variety: real control of real specific people. and then you should contemplate the effect of routinely having this sort of power over a decade or whatever it may be. a certain air of arbitrary superiority is likely to develop, due to the real superiority.

the legal status of a police officer can be accurately reprersented as a series of legal impunities, as being authorized to do what would be crimes for others: binding or kidnapping people, for example, strutting around with guns and clubs on their hips, and so on. and it relies also on an informal exemption that is much more wide-ranging than that, as seen in the cases before us. these things are not addressable, i think, within the basic conceptuality that presupposes that such power is necessary and legitimate.

i do not think it is particularly plausible that constituting this sort of power is likely to reduce violence in the society as a whole. or, i wonder what evidence could actually be produced that it does? this is always asserted at the outset; it is 'common sense'. but the idea of arming one group against the others and immunizing them from the law does not, let's say, obviously entail a reduction in violence or crime however construed. and notice that in various complex ways this police power will of course mirror the power hierarchies of the society: racial, for example, and then it reinforces or reproduces or enforces those hierarchies. if you really thought about the role of policing in racial oppression through our whole history, you'd see that it is central: a necessary condition of the whole horrendously violent history, and ever more so in a situation in which mass incarceration replaced jim crow as a mode of segregation.

November 12, 2014

goldman argues that the government and the drug cartels have merged, fully, and are dumping children's corpses into rivers. it is funny watching statists suddenly completely bewildered by the howling contradictions, infinite regresses, and so on that have always obviously been inherent at the essence of their position. oh my god! says hayes, if the government is the drug cartels, what can be done? there must be a force sufficient to hold the government to account, says hayes, as he looks completely flummoxed: the only thing this smart person can envisage is creating a new, more powerful state to control the old corrupt state. so then when all those segments in turn merge, you will be facing an even more impossible-to-constrain force. and then who will constrain it? you really do need god. after that, you're gonna need mega-god. this may well be the origin of monotheism, which never helped anything.

the usually extremely thoughtful goldman, too, is completely at a loss as to what even conceptually could possibly be done: someone, something, must impose the rule of law! he asserts, in answer to the question of what practically might improve the situation: he seems literally to be invoking athena, or deciding to believe in some force or other by a sheer kierkegaardian leap of faith. something, someone, somewhere help me. this, intellectually and practically, is where your own commitments led you: you have advocated the force that creates this monstrous oppression; suddenly you realize you can't even face the rudimentary entailments of your position: you started on this road by constituting a power capable of controlling the powers that existed already. that was the most general solution, and yet it entails an infinite repress.

the conceptual and the practical problem, remakably, are exactly the same in this case. you wouldn't think someone could miss both simultaneously, but there it is.

the merging of a government and a drug cartel is a pretty typical scenario, and is just one version of squishy totalitarianism. you are not going to keep economic and political power apart, you dorks! it's quite as though the us government were not distinguishable from the oil companies, or j.p. morgan/chase, or blackwater. fortunatley, those aren't vicious or violent, unlike a drug cartel. they'd never kill you to preserve their territory or market share, or just because, would they?

seriously, a state-leftist solution - the only one envisionable in that structure of thought - would be to nationalize the drug cartels or make them public utilities: just straight-up to endorse the merger you find intolerable and are trying to solve. it is already a socialist system on the ground: that is, a merger of state and economy. that is supposed to be an egalitarian formula.

October 01, 2014

meanwhile matt bai is everywhere with his book about 'when american politics went tabloid': the gary hart sex scandal during the 1988 presidential campaign. so one thing's obvious in the radio interviews etc: hart is bai's hero and he thinks that's where everything went terribly wrong. i can see the argument that who one may be fucking is not really the most relevant piece of info with regard to political leaders. but what i like about this era of examining leaders' private lives is that it continually punctures the mystique in which power enshrouds itself. it shows people wearing suits or uniforms who emerged from yale law school to run our nation are at least as gross and stupid as anyone else. it reveals over and over and over why people want power and what they do with it when they get it. when you get to the point where there just is no mystique, no possible cult, of state power, when all glamour has been scrubbed clean, then everyone is a de facto anarchist,.

the secret service fence-jumper scandal is the only thing they want to talk about on cnn and msnbc. war in the middle east has dwindled to irrelevance. amazingly, this is in a situation in which nothing really bad actually happened. whatever. chill and re-think your security.

meanwhile, morning joe among others is bemoaning the fact that one 'pillar' after another - all the institutions that the american people apparently trusted - the secret service, the nsa, the irs, congress, etc - has lost all credibility. thank god we still trust the military, seemed to be the consensus. so why would trusting the government be a desirable state, and when were the american people ever doltish or submissive enough to trust the irs or congress? i don't even think that is is physically, morally, or intellectually possible.

i hope they are being sarcastic about the military. trust the military? have you lost your fucking mind or been asleep for the last half century? also, what the hell, the military is precisely what gave us american hero omar gonzalez.

people who trust those who seize and hold power over them, or trust the institutions in which they are embedded, by which they are surveilled etc, are likely to be raped and executed, and, honestly, it's fundamentally their own doing: evidently what they want and deserve. right now people are just visibly yearning to submit, and are so upset and alienated that watching the news makes that harder. but a situation in which it is glaringly obvious that only a masochistic cretin would trust the authorities is better than a situation wherein everyone or indeed anyone trusts the authorities. that can only be based on secrecy and lies, because the fucking authorities are no better than you or me, to put it mildly.

September 09, 2014

sorry for no blogging. life just a touch overfull of late. but i am back, beeches. this series in the washpost is well worth reading: policing as a racket. (also, the layout/presentation of the series is interesting as an example of the way news might look in the future.) it really has reached the point where i just do not understand how any even vaguely rational person could defend the legitimacy of the political state, or how anyone could think of it as a realistic solution to anything. why don't we just grab a bunch of people - at random, or because they are people who like that sort of thing - and hand them a bunch of clubs and guns and decorate them with devices symbolizing their superiority and impunity when they take our stuff or shoot our ass. that will make things better. it's quite like believing in leprechauns, only less harmless and less empirical: a suicide cult, maybe, but not a decent or coherent position, and i say that that could not be more obvious.

September 01, 2014

one account of what's going on with isis puts the blame on 'stateless' or 'ungoverned' areas (another traditional formulation is 'failed state'). that's where the danger is suposed to lie, where terror blooms. but, first, surely the problems of syria and iraq are basically fomented by oppressive/corrupt governements. and second, is provides a pretty good model of how states arise (obviously, it calls itself a state) a more realistic version than the just-so stories of a hobbes or locke. people don't band together for mutual protection; they band together for rapine and sack (or religious fanaticism, or both). then as they roll in, you face a choice: die/lose evertything, or declare your loyalty to the sackers. pretty easy choice. your loyalty will expressed as tribute/protectio/taxes. then you are under the gang's protection, and they will start to consolidate a base by providing social services as well as physical protection from themselves and others. that's how the crips behaved in la, e.g., or hamas in gaza, and i speculate that it is the origin of the political state.

July 28, 2014

I have a new piece up on the Defeatists. It will surface eventually over at Veterans Today but this one doesn't have the musical pieces just linked but embedded. As well as John Oliver's piece last night on our version of the great leap forward, the Nuclear Program. Did you know our Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has been in charge while we decommissioned fewer nuclear missiles than were done under Bush? Either one? Amazing.

I'm fairly irate over a lot of things involving the various wars we're not fighting but are definitely invested in. What the hell? The one way to guarantee Sunni-Shiite peace is through blowing up Christian and Shiite shrines...this is obviously a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis funded al Queida (just never stopped sending the checks they sent the Muhajadeen, I suppose) and are probably funding the current loonies. Malaki is the classic American puppet who really turns into a bad boy as soon as he can. Unfortunately, the bad guys were perfectly ready to smash his ass; so, blood bath.

And so it goes. Gaza is horrifying; both Jon Stewart and John Oliver have laid out how insane that mess is becoming. When you can arrange to give the moral high ground away for generations to a bunch of missile firing terrorists, you've done something pretty amazing. Ukarine is dumbfounding. We're cowering behind our fence wondering what to do about 50000 children fleeing terror, hatred, violence, oppression and slavery, and we're questioning whether or not they deserve asylum? They deserve fucking medals; give them 40 acres and a mule, and Mom and kids will make that desert bloom...

July 26, 2014

empathy varies inversely with power. i'd say that's something we all know by experience, though it's nice to have some evidence. perhaps you have actually dealt with high school principals, policepersons, judges, irs officials, very rich persons, or senators, for example. i'd explain it as follows: people who seek power are morally worse, on average, than those who do not (this is true more or less by definition, as though i said: people who try to accomplish evil are worse on average...), and sometimes people who seek power get it, while people who do not rarely do. and second, power makes you a worse person, which is actually the conclusion of the piece. now, if you do not draw anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical - indeed anarchist - conclusions from this, you should try. and what i would really recommend is that people stop lionizing the powerful, worshipping barack a la 2008 or clinton or gore or bill gates or whatever it may be. powerful people should be under continuous suspicion, should be regarded with continuous skepticism. the only real point has to be to hem them in, mitigate their disastrous effects, or tear them down. the human desire to be subordinated just puts us in the hands of the worst among us. that we want the exploitation, poverty, and rape that we receive from authorities, however, does not entail that the authorities aren't evil.

on the other hand, the piece does that silly brain thing, where they say that, though some people think that powerful people need others less and hence attend to their feelings less, the authors have a different hypothesis: 'we contend that when people experience power, their brains fundamentally change how sensitive they are to the actions of others.' now first of all, why aren't those alternative descriptions of the very same thing? and second, what the heck do you gain by retreating into the brain? it's just doing no work. 'my brain is making me less sensitive' or 'my brain is changing me': how much sense or content is there in claims like that? or maybe i am making my brain less sensitive. when my brain affects me (how surprising!), what is affecting what? this same let's say casual line of thought might identify my self with my brain, which would make it very strange indeed to say that my brain is changing me. is it supposed to be explanatory to say the x is the cause of x? but it does suggest that power and interactions with others in general can be reduced to internal brain states, which is just counter-productive. actual interactions of your brain and the rest of you with other people and the outside world are actually occuring. the problem is interpersonal, not intracranial. but if it were in your brain, power and its effects could possibly be treated with drugs or psycho-surgery, which would be good, and might keep us from having to open internment/re-education/labor camps for assistant principals after the revolution.

July 21, 2014

when juxtaposed, two stories from today beautifully illustrate the concept of squishy totalitarianism, as well as providing an example of a system of government extremely typical of the 20th century: the marxist kleptocracy. or they give you a perfect crystallization of the essence of the state: the collectivist, unifying rhetoric - the government is all of us together! - and the swiss bank accounts into which the people producing that rhetoric are depositing more or less the entire nation. people want more more more of this or see no alternative whatsoever, so i predict that they'll be getting heaping helpings of what they're begging for: to be told what to do by the people who are robbing them. it's the social contract.

July 08, 2014

a hundred years on, and no one even yet has any idea what caused wwi. oops! oh dang. really, if it weren't for the millions dead, the thing would be pure entertainment: keystone cops run europe. it's more or less the inexorable illogic of statism, which in essence is: let's pick out a power-mad dolt and do whatever he says. rape me.

June 04, 2014

Not so long ago, a buddy of mine named Eric Garland tweeted that he didn't think most of Thomas Piketty's critics had read the book. I responded by asking if he had just learned about the nonexistence of Santa Claus. Eric, a somewhat anarchical economic analyst and bass player responded with "No Santa? Next you'll say no confidence fariy."

But, his ironic comment about the critics and Piketty makes a great point. If you're reading this blog, you probably recognize the name, and have an idea about what the guy has established as a position. Accrued wealth accrues more wealth faster than labor...or, rich people get rich faster than workers.This results in imbalance and is not a positive factor. But, sheesh, it's a thick book and most of it is review of research and a lot of it is boring stuff about calvados and cheese production in Normandy or something -- is there a Powerpoint adaptation?

Last weekend, John Oliver ranted for 13 hilarious minutes on his new TV show, Last Week Tonight about the problem of boredom. We have the collective attention span of gerbils. So, if you want to sneak something by us, do so in the most boring possible way. In the Senate and the House, they can use their rules to safely put those of us not working n the capital to sleep-deprived fever dreams in no time. With bureaucratic things like Net Neutrality, they can do it with discussions of rules.

I have Oliver's piece andmy thoughts on the mess available here.Short form, they want us to trust the broadband industry to take care of our interests. Sure, trust the bureaucrats (did you know the guy running the FCC is the former chief lobbyist for the Cable industry??) and the lobbyists because...Benghazi?

April 10, 2014

re-reading through peter kropotkin and the history of anarchist theory generally, i conclude again that he is a very impressive person and a very wide-ranging intellectual, as well as the best theorist that anarchism has produced, by quite a ways. one excellent set of moments in modern science and anarchism, is where he gently but definitely points out that the claims of various political theorists - especially those influenced by hegel - to science, are ridiculous. he has a go at the 'dialectical method', for example, which many people took seriously and took to be scientific. well, he is puncturing the pretensions not only of marx, but of proudhon, for instance. all you have to say is that the thing is not driven by observation or experiment: it is a purely a priori conceptual structure into which data are jammed. or fourier, or comte: that their views constitute science is their most characteristic assertion, but lord knows what they can possibly mean by 'science': they certainly do not mean that their results are based on systematic empirical observation that is open to whatever is actual. when they foretell the future, and it happens to be the future they want, they call that science (marx is the very most extreme case of this). when their opponents disagree, they just respond that you can't argue with science. it's quite disingenuous or self-deceived, and it is certainly ridiculous.

now kropotkin appeals to science too, but he was actually a distinguished geographer and naturalist. his own deployments of science - for example in the utter refutation of social darwinism/hobbesian justifications of state power in mutual aid - have their own difficulties, or their own slippage between the descriptive and the normative - but they have something to do with actual science, and he has thought long and hard about what that actually means.

we live in an era of renewed scientism, conducted on an extremely primitive level: the left accuses the right of not believing what science says. or any disagreement with the latest study, contradicting the last one and the next one, is savaged as irrationality. man if you look at the history of science and then believe whatever 'science' 'says' right now, you really have failed at basic induction. and the idea of 'what science says' - as though science was a person with a voice - is a mere appeal to the authority of scripture and a mysterious priesthood. and of course people are still claiming the mantle of science for whatever politics they want, or making it equivalent to the political program of the democratic party or something. if you disagree with al gore's plans for a world regulatory regime, you don't accept 'science'. or a candidate for office might actually be asked whether he 'believes in science', for pity's sake. science is something with a definite set of assertions and values that you accept or reject, quite like - or more than merely like - a religion.

the first thing to say about science - actual science - is that it is open to criticism: critically, independently assessing the results of science is science. if you have to accept whatever psychologists or brain boys or string theorists say on pain of being irrational = heretical, then science is impossible. the people who beat this drum are killing what they purport to love. and if people are interpreting scientific results as entailing their own pre-existing political positions: well, you should regard everything else they say with extreme scepticism. it's definitely not going to be actual science that tells you what to do or who to vote for or what policies to prefer, so if someone is saying that it does, they've got nothing to do with science except as its betrayers.

April 07, 2014

that the left in the 20th century, apparently in the pursuit of justice or equality, descended into horrendous totalitarianism, resulting in the suffering-unto-death of millions of persons, is not, i assert, a forgivable or an understandable mistake. endorsement of marxist communism or state socialism was just an obvious endorsement of tyranny, oppression, exploitation, and mindless propaganda. advocacy of twentieth-century communism constituted advocacy precisely of inequality and injustice of the most extreme and explicit imaginable variety. it's no more forgivable than endorsing, let's say, the annihilation of the jews or chattel slavery. and i will say this: the left is still utterly dominated by statism, and it's no more decent or plausible or egalitarian than it ever was.

dude, you did not have to wait for stalin's show trials - though if you persisted after that you were explicitly endorsing a monstrous politics in a way that you couldn't possibly hide from yourself or anyone else. the point was incredibly obvious to common sense, but also all sorts of people were warning you about it, including a whole nother strand of the left. they warned about it 1840, 1900, 1919 (emma goldman on the soviet union, e.g.), and at all points between. marxists kicked the ass of anarchists, but definitely not because the marxists were making even vague sense, and certainly not because their inspiring vision of the future wasn't a nightmare of stupid pain.

anyway, i'm prompted to return to these points by rereading kropotkin's modern science and anarchism as i gear up to teach it. this is 1901, but anarchists had already been saying this for sixty years. proudhon attacked the state communism of weitling and others in 1840 on precisely these grounds. kropotkin:

The opinions of the anarchists concerning the form which the remuneration of labor may take in a society freed from the yoke of capital and the State still remain divided. To begin with, all are agreed in repudiating the new form of the wage system which would be established if the State becamne the owner of all the land, the mines, the factories, the railways, and so on, and the great manager of agriculture and all industries. If these powers were added to those which the State already possesses (taxes, defence of the territory, subsidized religions, etc.), we should create a new tyranny even more terrible than the old one.

marx endorsed placing all these powers in the hands of the state, and added, for example, banking, education, and communications (see the end of the commie manifesto). it's just the most obviously disastrous formula in human moral history, and people even of the left with some shred of decency knew that when it was being articulated. you hardly even have to state the refutation: the thing just sits there, being palpably ridiculous and straight-up evil. and honestly, anyone who ever endorsed it was or is a dolt or a slave or a very bad person or some combination. i am going to include in that assessment benjamin and adorno, for example, or zizek, say, or hardt and negri. no the grotesque basic failure of heart and intellect is not mitigated by burying the whole thing under various new layers of mumbo-jumbo. the shit has just got to be over.

dilute versions of that thing are all the left has, even now. they could have gone another way, but they weren't good enough as human beings or not independent enough as thinkers to draw the most obvious conclusions; in some cases they expressed their devotion even as they were dying at the hands of the totalitarianism they wanted. the mistake is so obvious, the position so implausible, that embracing it - i would have said if i didn't know differently - is just not possible. there is no explanation, excuse, reationalization that makes this forgivable.

so people of vague leftist leanings just think that that whole side of the spectrum means well, has a basic commitment to justice or equality or progress that makes it all understandable or something. racial suprematists, or terrorist jihadis, or for that matter laissez-faire capitalists, have exactly the same excuse: well, they mean well, if you listen to themselves. if you forgive some of these people on the grounds of their stated intentions - even while their actual procedures lead to utter disaster precisely for the values they themselves purport to hold, and even though that is the only thing that could possibly be rationally expected - you should forgive them all.

now, when i say the position is 'unforgivable', i do not mean that we should execute zizek or negri, or lob them into a new gulag, or place them at the forced-labor farm, or censor their works, or have the secret police blackmail their families to expose their misdeeds, desperately as they're begging for it. but we should definitely take it as a reflection on their intellect, sincerity, or decency. disqualify anything they say that has any political bearing on anything.

March 21, 2014

one thing about a hierarchical organization based on coercion, incorporating an ethic of obedience, such as a military: it's a rape factory, more or less by definition. if people didn't want other people to be raped - or indeed to rape &/v be raped themselves - they wouldn't tolerate this sort of organization.

March 17, 2014

i will be on the al-jazeera english show "the stream" live at 3:30, talking with a cool panel about contemporary anarchism. now, al-jazeera english is not al-jazeera america, nor is the stream on aja the same as the stream on aje. and plus aje is "geo-blocked" in the states. one might be able to access it here, and maybe i'll be able to post a link to the video at some point.

March 09, 2014

i define 'terrorism' as military-style action directed primarily at non-combatants. by that standard, both allied and axis "strategic" bombing campaigns in ww2, culminating in dropping atomic bombs on japan, constituted terrorism on an extreme scale. (just for the hell of it, with regard to the approach of monuments men, it would be worth thinking about the great works of art and cultural treasures of various sorts that were destroyed by allied bombing, such as dresden. i think the total would be far more than the germans stole.) one theory that would fully justify such action would, believe it or not, be basic statism: hobbes leviathan, for example, or rousseau general will: the state is really all of us as a single individual: we all have one will, etc etc. why are you paying taxes, whether for food stamps or stealth bombers? because you're paying taxes to all of us together, because we're all in this together. well then if you're at war with 'germany' the average peasant woman who just wants to forget about politics and war is as legitimate a target as goering; indeed they are the very same person. if you feel that 'america' is messing up your region or your religion, you should kill any american you can: your flying airplanes into skyscrapers is as valid as your complaint against the 'nation'. if you're in a total war with 'japan', then your goal is kill japan, i.e. on this excruciatingly wrong theory absolutely every japanese person qua single agent. and it's not just nationalism/statism, but collective consciousness: oh what shall we do about 'the jew'? 'the jew' is all the jews as a single person. oh well, annihilate them all, no matter the differences and distances, no matter how irrelevant to any actual grievances a particular cell in the giant jew organism is. what shall we do about the negro? here's an individual: the bourgeosie: liquidate that individual. you should think about this every single time you effortlessly deploy any collective, group, or national identity.

January 30, 2014

the other day i was complaining about the translation of the text of the wunengzi in john rapp's recent book daoism and anarchism. wunengzi (the "master of no abilities") was apparently a wandering daoist sage of the 9th century whose sayings were found on scraps of paper by a disiciple. i do not read chinese, so what i do below is this: i paraphrase the translation (attributed to catrina siu, edited by john rapp) into something that has something to do with the language that the text is being translated into.

i think the wunengzi is a fundamentally important text on multiple grounds. it shows that a persistent, explicit anarchist strain existed in taoism over centuries. (i certainly think it's there in the tao te ching and the chuang tzu.) but it is also an extremely interesting set of developments in taoist metaphysics, ethics, and so on.

Wunengzi, Part 1, Chapter 1

Some people say that there is an important distinction between human beings and other sorts of things. The truth is that the distinction between ourselves and birds, mammals, reptiles, or fish is something we invented. "But wait, people have consciousness and language!" Well, birds and beasts, even insects and worms, all want life and avoid death, construct nests, gather food, give birth to their young and protect them, and so do we; we are more similar to these things than we are different. And anyway, how do you know they're not conscious? Each species calls and chirps and screeches, each in its own way. What makes you think that isn't language? You're making our ignorance your argument. They're probably listening to us chatter and thinking that we're the ones without language or intelligence. We are very similar to all these creatures, though our bodies are a little different. The other birds and beasts are as different from one another as we are from them: neither the similarities nor the differences are particularly unusual. For that matter, we've got as many similarities with and differences from one another as we do with regard to them.

It's really too bad that we made such distinctions. The universe as a whole is sky and earth, yin and yang. We and the other creatures are part of it, immersed in its material flow (qi); we are of the same body. We're like fish in a river, like grasslands or woods in the mountains.

Originally, all creatures lived together indiscriminately, with no distinction or hierarchy between men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, older and younger brothers. They slept in nests or caves, not in mansions or palaces. They hunted and ate what they found raw. There was no stealing or murder. The living moved around; the dead keeled over; there were no funeral rites. They followed the world: there was no ruling or shepherding one another. In their original simplicity, they lived long lives.

At some point, a group of naked animals began to call themselves 'people'. They tried to establish rules so they could dominate the animals with feathers, fur, and scales. They taught themselves sowing and planting and began to use the plow. They made axes and cut trees and made bricks to build palaces. They instituted marriage and the hierarchical distinctions between men and women, fathers and sons, older and younger brothers. They made nets to catch the other creatures, and developed a taste for prepared food. Their simplicity gave way to selfishness, and they thought all these distinctions were natural. Those that held themselves to be 'intelligent' appointed a leader, and everyone else was his servant. He could control the multitude, but they couldn't control him. From this came the distinction between ruler and ruled, the exalted and the lowly.

Eventually, a whole human hierarchy was established by the "wise" and "intelligent". Material wealth distinguished high and the low, and only the rich could satisfy their desires. Sometimes they called the wise and intelligent ones 'sages'.

Soon, the disgraced became envious of the honored, the poor became envious of the wealthy; these distinctions drew everyone into conflict. The people who called themselves sages were worried, and they said, "We separated ourselves from the other creatures by calling ourselves 'people'; then we separated ourselves from one another into rulers and ruled. Then we created a hierarchy of wealth and rank, which inflames everyone's greed. We honored people for being wealthy and they taxed the poor and disgraced them. Now we live in a world of chaos: of crazy desires, competitiveness, and mutual destruction."

One among the "sages" arose and said "I have a plan!" He [Confucius] taught benevolence, loyalty, truthfulness, and that the people could be regulated by ritual and music. When a ruler oppressed his subjects, he was to be called cruel, and his government illegitimate. In turn, the ruler would call them traitors. A father should be criticized for not loving his son, he taught, a son for not obeying his father, a younger brother for being unfilial to his elder, married people for not being faithful. People, the sage taught, should sorted out by how they behaved: the right should be honored and the wrong disgraced, so that people would find pleasure in doing right and pain in doing wrong. This succeeded in suppressing conflict to some extent for some time.

But as time went on, things again broke down; people turned their backs on benevolence, truthfulness, and loyalty, and they transgressed the standards for ritual and music that the sage had set. Then the people who thought themselves wise decided to crack down. They established laws and punishments and organized armies and police forces to constrain people. When there were small offenses, they punished people. For big offenses, they sent armies to kill people. Prisons and whips spread over the country. Spears and pikes and bows and arrows spread out into the world. Families were destroyed, whole kingdoms full of people were annihilated. Too many people died to count. People sank into poverty and starved; it spread everywhere.

The original problem was distinguishing ourselves from the animals as something higher, and then thinking of some people - in their mansions and palaces, with their fine meals - as higher than others. Honoring some and disgracing others made people want to hurt each other; imposing benevolence, ritual, music distorted people's spontaneity. Imposing laws and punishments and armies immiserated people and made them lose what was essential; together in great numbers they died. They could not revive the past. It was the fault of those who thought themselves wise.

January 25, 2014

i was extremely pleased to get ahold of daoism and anarchism, by john rapp. that's my religion and my politics, or my anti-religion and anti-politics, together like bacon and eggs, abbott and costello, love and pain. let me start with the amazing strengths, what makes it worth its excessive price in spite of everything. there are several texts here, appearing for the first time in english, or at any rate very little known to western scholars, that fully substantiate a history of extremely clear taoist anti-statism and anti-hierarchical thinking more or less all the way through. in particular, texts denoted 'bao jingyan' (5th century ad) and 'wu nengzi' (9th century ad), were completely new to me and, i believe, are fundamentally important in the history of both daoism and anarchism.

now for the extreme drawbacks. 'john rapp' sounds like the name of a native speaker of english, but his own text appears to have been mistranslated from mandarin or something. he's got some uselessly doctrinaire vision of what anarchism is and is always apologizing that taoist sages don't sound more like bakunin. but it'd be tough to be a taoist sage in the tenth century pursuing violent proletarian insurrection, i feel. in every case including the whole book he starts by formulating devastating objections from imagined interlocutors to his own project, but it is impossible to say why. this material needs an enthusiast and a scholar, not a series of defensive manouevers against the last 3 bakuninists.

on behalf of the wunengzi, he apologizes to anarchists cause it's too tolstoyesque, and to enthusiasts for taoism because it's too buddhist. but all the great chinese philosophy of that era and hundreds of years before and after is actually syncretic; all the mnost interesting stuff has taoist, confucian, and buddhist elements. this is true of the great neo-confucians, for example. it can be done in a profound way, and often is, and you have got to take the era on something like its own terms to get it at all.

when in his appendix of texts he reprints burton watson's translations, one can't quibble, of course. but he seems to have commissioned his own translation of the wunengzi, which could be a major contribution to the taoist canon in english. (nevertheless, rapp apologizes to anarchists for its taoism, etc; he doesn't appear very impressed with it, has all sorts of reservations.) the translation is an unbelievable wretched mess, just as though no one even read it over in english before they published it. here's a sample and i tell you it is representative: "People of ancient times until now, those determined to be their relatives were their blood-kin, thereupon their affections had a point to specialize on." there is sentence after sentence like that, and sheer gobbeldygook is, believe it or not, only one of the grotesque issues. bloomsbury academic published this in the uk, continuum in the us. no, absolutely not.

what i am going to do here in a bit is re-work part 1, chapter 1, which appears to me to be extremely profound on multiple levels, into something resembling contemporary english.

January 23, 2014

let's say that the "independent executive review board" (whatever that may be, exactly) is right that the nsa surveillance programs are illegal (than which nothing could be more obvious). and then stipulate that we live under the rule of law. (admittedly, i have argued that rule of law is conceptually impossible, on multiple grounds; let's take seriously the way politicians talk for a second.) well then, actual persons have committed actual crimes. general keith b. alexander has committed literally billions of criminal acts. if no one is above the law, then if these things are indeed illegal, then every person embedded in this bureaucracy ought to be prosecuted as an individual. correct? that's what their own rhetoric, which admittedly is a bunch of bullshit, demands. barack obama and george w. bush are guilty of directing a vast criminal conspiracy. indeed, this is as extreme a case as you'll run into of racketeering, as organized a crime syndicate as has ever existed.

here's how a pres gets out of this: "alberto gonzales wrote me a memo saying it was ok!" i suggest you try that in your next trial for murder, rape, theft, or whetever hobbies you may have of which the authorities disapprove. really, that's the defense? your own lackeys told you that organized crime was no prob? anyway, if we just held these people to their own proclaimed standards and their own simulated sacred commitments and deepest beliefs, anarchy would be here this afternoon. and i just want to remark to the conspirators as they gaze into the mirror that you can indeed immunize yourself from the legal consequences. you can't be imprisoned if you've already hung yourself in shame at your betrayal of your selves. this is where roman senators fell on their swords or samurai committed seppeku. where's your honor, man?

December 30, 2013

2013 was a great year to be anarchist, as usual. really, everyone saw this year that anarchism is the only non-nightmare option, the only future that any decent person could possibly want. or if they didn't see that, it's not because it wasn't maximally obvious. think for a brief moment about what the governments of the world did this year, and then tell me you want more. we win again!

i think, in the face of centuries of disaster, war, enforced extreme hierarchy in every dimension, genocide, grinding daily oppression by idiots, hare-brained schemes gone mindfuckingly awry, etc., the idea of the political state is easily the worst idea human beings ever had, and it has been refuted thousands of times over by its own reality. the only argument at this point can be: there is absolutely no alternative: we are trapped conceptually in this idea unto the deaths of each of us, our species, and our planet. so, if you really cannot imagine an alternative, surf joyously to oblivion!

November 03, 2013

'anti-government,' as in the lax shooting, is routinely used to mean violent insanity. here's what, as an anarchist, i demand from the fcc. every time there's a story about a war, i want both sides described as 'pro-government.' every time you mention assad, for example, describe him as a 'pro-government activist.' 'new leaks reveal that pro-government extremists have angela merkel under surveillance'. 'today, china's pro-government regime warmed its hands at a bonfire of uyghurs'. tim mcveigh might have been an anti-government extremist, but he was also a mere amateur of murder. obviously, history's greatest mass murderers, from hitler to pol pot, have all been pro-government extremists. historians speculate that the people who developed chemical, biological, and atomic weaponry harbored pro-government beliefs. worse yet, pro-government people may well be responsible for the failure of the obamacare website.

it may be hard for reasonable, normal people like us to understand how someone drifts to a pro-government position. i imagine there are pro-government tracts lying around james clapper's house, or wherever violent oppressors and excruciating intellectual mediocrities congregate. seriously, everyone should be on the lookout for warning signs among members of their family and their friends. like say, for example, you notice a copy of rawls' theory of justice casually tossed in the backseat, or hear someone casually saying that he intends to vote or something: put two such factors together, and you may have a very dangerous fuckwad indeed. science is beginning to demonstrate what is really happening: research shows that under scanning, the capitulation region of the amygdala or stupid bit manifests enhanced activity in such persons. astonishing? perhaps. yet that is what the research shows. pfizer's working on it.

unlike anti-government extremists, pro-government extremists always appear in groups, herds, flocks, swat teams, gangs, armies, parties, forces, agencies, or murders, and so whereas anti-government extremists pick off a poor sucker here or there, pro-government extremists and their tiny unanimous followers are always industriously digging mass graves. there is much to be said, qua murderer, for the disgruntled loner. real violent extremism - real, genuine evil - exists, and we should study how people drift to pro-government positions and how this can be prevented. i think they lack self-esteem, and you know, when people tell a kid that she can belong to a big powerful group, such as a cult, and tell her she is worth something because she belongs, she'll inform on her own mom.

October 06, 2013

as an anarchist, i'm always asked about the criminal justice problem. one issue with the whole thing is that the authorities are themselves often the criminals. but at any rate, here is some sort of model. the statist model is this: to constrain crime (whatever that means exactly), we will institute an irresistible armed force. after you do that, of course, you're liable to be its victim, with no recourse, and you've potentially constituted also a massive criminal enterprise, or just assigned the proceeds of all criminal enterprises to your little martinets. spontaneous organization for self-protection tries to resist both state and non-state killers, rapists, dealers, and so on.

July 07, 2013

if i were re-narrating the history of american thought - which i seem to be - i'd add or even centralize centralize a line winding through some of the following figures: roger williams, anne hutchinson, john woolman, jefferson, lucretia mott, emerson, josiah warren, fuller, thoreau, lysander spooner, voltairine de cleyre, mencken. i have to say i think the anarchist anthropology of folks like david graeber and james c. scott is the biggest development in that sort of theory since kropotkin.

Look to like reading someone or to love certain of the their ideas and arguments is not to endorse the whole damn package lock, stock, and barrel. Never get into the business of making someone you love turn out right all the time or on the other hand turning away from ideas because of distaste for the person. It might just be that, you know, decentralized government and individual rights are plausible notions on other grounds: like the insanely disastrous results of not taking them seriously. Jefferson: that hypocrite! If you think that shows that his ideas about liberty or whatever it may be are actually false, you are really not a reliable reasoner. I don't fear being indetectibly infected by controversial opinions by jolly irascible assholes from the 1920s, seriously. If there is at times a little anti-Semitic whiff or whatever, I repudiate that. Why would you let that deprive you of such good art and thought?

June 12, 2013

like i say, i think this is the fork in the road, where your way swung off, where you chose between freedom and slavery. it's revealing opinion-wise who takes what road. thomas friedman hesitantly throws his weight behind the view that the sheer fact that everyone is under surveillance is legitimately a secret. gene robinson hesitantly goes the other way: so hesitantly that it's hard to tell. one very big sign that some mealy-mouthed colluder in totalitarianism has no idea what to say is that he's glad that the discussion has been opened. it's an important discussion. one way i'd like to take this significant, open discussion is to open up the question of arming the population as a militia. i do think that we could responsibly market high explosives to patriotic groups of all kinds through gun shows. we're definitely going to need anti-aircraft materiel, e.g. i think, simultaneously, that we're going to have to think about disarming all agents of state power. safety first.

no, honestly, anyone who ever considered themselves a journalist is out of their minds to be ambivalent about this. what happened to the media? oh y'all didn't go to fucking grad school in communications or something? christ. whom do you identify with? what is the place of your own freedom to speak in a democracy or free society? time to admit that you're just pr or whatever.